LATER, IT WOULD TURN OUT THAT ANJEE wasn’t the only person whose heart would pang when she thought about Tonya.
A woman who had known Tonya during the time she lived in Chincoteague remembered how Tonya had offered to help her with her hair and makeup, and how, when the woman thanked her, Tonya said that she knew how important it was to be made to feel pretty. Her own family, the woman remembered her saying, never made her feel anything but bad.
Another friend remembered Tonya saying that her father had been mean, but not as mean as he’d been to her sister.
Another acquaintance, a man named Dale, heard about Tonya’s arrest when his father called him. Dale hadn’t thought of Tonya in years. They had dated during her last year of high school; he was a year or two older and they’d been introduced through friends.
Their relationship worked this way: the Bundick family didn’t have a telephone in the house, at least not one that Tonya seemed allowed to use. On Thursdays, her mother would drive her to a pay phone so she could call Dale and arrange a date. If she didn’t call, he would know that meant he wasn’t going to see her that weekend. If they did arrange a date, sometimes he got to her house and nobody would come to the door. The cars would be out front; he would know they were home. He would knock and call out that if Tonya didn’t want to see him, she only had to come to the door and say that herself. She wouldn’t come to the door. When he’d see her again a week or two later she never wanted him to mention those times.
Something in the house felt odd to Dale. He was young, and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was, mostly just a bad feeling. It seemed off when Carroll would scream at him for his tires taking up too much space on the skinny driveway. Or when Tonya would sneak a phone call from the burger place where she worked, and tell Dale to never mention it to her parents or they would make her quit the job.
On the first occasion he invited her to dinner at his father’s house, he got back from driving her home and his father pulled him aside and told him, “Something’s not right. Something’s not right there.”
One night during her senior year of high school, Dale got a call and it was Tonya. She told him she’d gotten in a fight with her parents and one of them had thrown boiling water on her. She didn’t say what the fight was about. She just asked him to come and get her. His father pointed out that it might be better for an adult to be the one to go to the house, so Dale called his grandparents, who lived near Tonya. It was the first time, as he remembers, that Tonya ever acknowledged something was wrong in her house.
She lived with his grandparents for a few months, he remembered, before going to live with one of her distant relatives, an aunt or uncle who lived a few towns over. Before, Tonya had been merely quiet. Now she seemed completely closed off, even to him. They couldn’t connect the way they used to. She seemed resentful, or maybe she was just embarrassed that he knew about her private life. The relationship didn’t last much longer. The experience had changed Tonya, but it had changed Dale, too, opening him up to a world of adult complexities. A few years older than Tonya, he’d already graduated high school and had his eye on joining the military. There had been things holding him to Accomack, though, and one of those things was Tonya. Now the biggest thing that had been keeping him there felt like a reason to leave. It wasn’t about Tonya, it was about the situation and how powerless it had made him feel.
No one else in Tonya’s life appeared to know that she wasn’t living at home anymore. In the “senior will and testament” section of her twelfth-grade yearbook, which was published after all of this happened, she left a note thanking Dale for a wonderful relationship, and giving “lots of love” to her mom and dad.
When Dale heard about Tonya and the arsons, it was because his father called him on the telephone and said, “Well. It looks like your ex-girlfriend’s been setting the world on fire. Didn’t you hear? Tonya’s the one they arrested.”
Dale let the news settle in and then told his dad, “It sounds horrible to say, but for some reason or another I’m not really surprised.” If someone had told him that one of his acquaintances had become an arsonist and asked him to guess which one, Tonya is who he would have picked. “By the time I had a chance to think about her childhood and family life,” Dale told his father, “I think she’d garnered a lot of anger. No doubt in my mind about that.”
It made him sad to think about the things in her that were probably broken a long time ago.
CHAPTER 22
“TIME TO WAKE UP”
THE COUNTY SEAT OF ACCOMACK was Accomac, which had come to be the center of government but lost a k along the way. It had little in the way of commerce but bail bondsmen and lawyers, clustered in small offices around the redbrick courthouse, and a small café that catered to the bail bondsmen and lawyers. The sheriff’s office and jail were directly across the street from the courthouse. The office of the Commonwealth’s attorney was kitty-corner from the courthouse, and in the middle of the triangle formed by the courthouse, jail, and Commonwealth’s attorney were the offices of Charlie’s defense attorney, Carl Bundick. It was within this small parcel of land that the preparations for the arsonists’ trial would begin to unfold.
Charlie didn’t need a trial. Charlie had already pleaded guilty; Charlie needed only to be sentenced. But the amount for which Charlie would be sentenced would depend on what happened with Tonya, who had pleaded not guilty. Tonya needed a trial. Because she’d been caught at the site of only one fire, and because there was no physical evidence linking either of them to the other crimes, she’d been charged with only one count of arson and one count of conspiracy. For the prosecution to charge her on anything else, or to get a guilty conviction on the charge they already had, what they needed was Charlie.
But first there was the matter of love.